Reintroduce missile series

[Pallidum (OP)]

With ground equipment series being a thing in 1. 12, would it be possible to reintroduce the missile series from VB6? I found it to be an invaluable feature during several of my campaigns in VB6.

[xenoscepter]

 - I never used it, what was so good in your opinion?

[Froggiest1982]

- I never used it, what was so good in your opinion?

When a missile is out of supply the ship would load a missile from the same class if available.

The system works very similarly to what Steve has done with replacements for the ground units. In fact, I believe he took the idea from there.

[QuakeIV]

As far as I know he intends on bringing it back

[NihilRex]

- I never used it, what was so good in your opinion?

There were also stupidly useful tricks, like designing a missile with homing sensors, assigning it to a series, and then researching an otherwise identical copy that lacked sensors.  The direct-targets hit first, and the homers were free to seek new targets.  Then, if the engagement ran long and you ran short of one or the other variety, the launchers would auto-switch.

The modern missile designer would make it even better, because you have more options in the design process.

[Droll]

- I never used it, what was so good in your opinion?

It completely eliminated micromanagement regarding outdated missiles. If your planets or ships run out of one missile type of the missile series, they will immediately default to the next missile in the same series as their template intended one.

Ships rearming at planets would automatically pick up missiles of the same type, ships that run out of modern missiles in their magazines would auto-switch their launchers to use the older missiles. The player did not need to change the ordnance loadout of the class to do this. Only when you wanted newer missiles to be loaded.

[Demetrious]

I can definitely second this suggestion; missile series were incredibly useful.  Currently, the necessity of manually altering every ship's ordinance loadout if you've had to load ships with mixed older/newer missiles is annoying (which the "copy to fleet" and "copy to class" buttons don't always help with, given you usually don't have enough obsolete missiles to fill your whole fleet. ) This much is obvious; I think the sticking point is coming up with a good way to integrate missile series with the new functionality of the ordinance loadouts system (which IS quite useful. ) Perhaps we should talk about that. 

[Elouda]

Yes, definitely would be nice to have this back, it made missile management so much simpler.

[Ektor]

I'm also missing the feature.